International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that, while purchasing costs of physical machines would not increase greatly, power and cooling costs would increase eight-fold, and server management and administration costs would increase four-fold. In practice, datacenters are operated with a focus on resource effectiveness over resource efficiency, which results in a doubling of administration, power and cooling costs every 9-24 months. Hence, there is a growing need to use IT resources efficiently, for example, by reducing costs incurred by administration, power and cooling by scaling down of datacenters.
To meet this need, virtualization technology is applied to a web server, a web application server, and a cluster for performing a large amount of computation in order to prevent some resources from remaining in idle state. That is, the resource utilization rate of physical machines is increased by operating the physical machines on processor-based or IO-based applications, according to application patterns used in the computing resources, such as processor, memory and input/output (I/O) resources. In other words, virtualization technology seeks to support a high overlap rate and a high utilization rate in applications by managing resources at the processor, memory and I/O resource level within the physical machines, instead of at the physical machine level.
Virtualization technology requires a resource manager that determines which physical machine provides resources required by a virtual machine. A management apparatus is needed to optimize resource consumption through self-management, based on loads required in a management function for the effective utilization of resources.
According to a related art virtualization-based resource management apparatus, a resource management application module running on an operating system (OS) manages one or more virtual machines. The resource management application module pre-estimates the capacity of physical machines according to the number of the virtual machines operating on the physical machines, resulting in the inefficient use of the physical machines. Furthermore, since network topology is configured statically, the resource management application module is unable to cope with variations in the amount of network resources used. Moreover, since resources consumed by the resource management apparatus itself are not managed, additional resources are not efficiently managed.
According to another related art virtualization-based resource management apparatus, a resource management application module runs on a virtual machine, and the virtual machine manages all physical machines and virtual machines designated for management, and manages a resource allocation relationship of the physical machines and the virtual machines. However, since the virtualization-based resource management apparatus itself does not recognize a virtualization environment, a system administrator separately monitors workloads of the virtualization-based resource management apparatus and performs additional resource allocation and resource reclamation. Consequently, due to the intervention of the system administrator, the efficiency of the resource management apparatus is lowered, and the load on the network IO is increased.